Web publishing systems convert data into web pages capable of being viewed by a user executing an XML interpreter or HTML interpreter such as those found in web browsing software. Web publishing systems are usually implemented in the context of a network. Traditionally these web pages have been manually produced, although software enabling the automatic generation of web pages has been growing in popularity in recent years. These conventional methods of generating a web page involve the use of stored data, the utilization of user input data, or a combination of both stored and user input data to produce a web page. These conventional automatically generated web pages present only a limited number of static data relationships between items referenced on the web page. The relationships are fixed links which do not change as the relationships in the underlying data change. Desktop publishing systems also generate documents converted from raw data but are implemented in the context of a stand-alone electronic device, usually a computer.
Communications software, such as email systems used in office settings, process and store large amounts of data. Conventional methods of retrieving data from the collection of stored data involve searching for the data by means of a title, subject, or message content reference. In the case of email messages, this can require a user to sort through a large number of emails containing identical subject lines without any means to distinguish one email from the next. Publishing systems working with these communications software packages have no effective means of presenting retrieved data to a user in a format that indicates the relationships between the presented piece of data and other pieces of stored data. Conventional methods of document publishing also do not allow the presentment to a user of the changes in the relationship between a piece of data and other data over time.